Microsoft, in its ongoing efforts to get the European Commission to leave it alone, has offered to license part of the Windows source code relating to various communications protocols. "Today we are putting our most valuable intellectual property on the table," Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice-president, said.

Yawn.

Microsoft has been making the source of Windows available to universities and corporations, in a museum exhibit "look but don't touch" sort of way, for years. Now, they say, expecting us to be impressed at their largesse, it will be "available to direct competitors for the first time". However, for all this talk of "competitors" (plural), the source code continues effectively to be unavailable to developers of Microsoft's only real competitor for this function, the Samba server.

Samba is a free software implementation of the protocols in question, and the current version ships with almost every single significant non-Microsoft operating system on the planet. Under the current terms, the developers can't afford a licence, and even if they got one, probably wouldn't want to read the code in case Microsoft sued them later. Australia is the nexus of Samba development, and even the European Commission's long arms don't reach that far.

Fundamentally, the Microsoft/EC circus will remain a sideshow until and unless the Samba team gets the access that they need on terms they can agree to. And, as the original order didn't (and probably couldn't) mandate all that would be required to achieve that – basically gratis and legally-protected source code reading rights and clear documentation to find their way around it – it's unlikely that the process will ever produce anything of interest to the free software community.

And in a sense, that's absolutely fine. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; while the politicians and lawyers have been busy in courts, the hackers have been writing code. Earlier this week, Jeremy Allison of the Samba project released the first technology preview of Samba 4, a new version designed to be a drop-in replacement for the latest, and extremely expensive, Windows 2003 Server.

The community doesn't really need the help of politicians. Rather, what it would like them to do is get out of the way, and not hinder or destroy their work by imposing laws such as software patents or (by requiring it to enforce Digital Restrictions Management), banning free software which accesses movies and music, as the French are trying to do.

The case continues, and at some point one side or the other will declare "a victory for consumers" or "a triumph for commonsense". But, like much lengthy litigation, the only real winners will be the lawyers.

Gervase Markham works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet. His blog is Hacking For Christ.

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